AGON Episode 1 Review

The Only AGONy Lies in Waiting....

Adventure fans are in for a treat if this, the first of fourteen
planned episodes of AGON,
is anything to go by. The game is being published by a small company
named Private Moon Studios over the course of the next two years.

The "London Episode," as it is called, basically serves to set up
the plot for the rest of the game—the hunt for the titular and
mysterious Agon in fourteen locations across the globe.

A list of game controls

Considering the amount of compression that must have gone into
AGON, the graphics are beautiful, and the quality of the
rendered movies is the best I've seen in an adventure game. The only
other time I've seen no graphical artifacts in an in-game movie was in
Diablo II. The actors, whose movements have been
motion-captured, look about like what you'd expect from a modern 3D
adventure. The game is presented mostly from a first-person
perspective, but the player character is well-defined: we see his
reflections in windows and the like. The reflections are not static,
either; you'll see the character blink and shuffle about. The game is
controlled via a single mouse cursor that morphs into various shapes
for movement, inspection, picking up items, etc. A full list can be
seen in the first screenshot. As in Zork: Nemesis, almost every
screen is a panorama that allows you to rotate 360 degrees as look up
and down a limited amount. Movement is accompanied by transitions in
the style of Schizm, which looks very nice but is painful when
you want to go somewhere fast—I'd like there to be an option to
turn them off.

Not that you'll need to backtrack much—the scope of the
episode is limited to a few rooms, and all the puzzles are excellently
clued. There's no hunt-the-pixel for items either. One minor gripe is
that not all objects are accessible from all locations— for
example, you need to be standing in the right place to look in the
wastepaper basket. On the other hand, this type of movement appears to
be a deliberate obfuscation in an amusing treasure hunt later
on. Furthermore, the main character usually lets you know immediately
whether a puzzle's solution is right or whether there's something
you've forgotten, saving you a lot of frustrating clicking about. A
few times, you'll have to enter things on an on-screen keyboard using
the mouse. It would have been nice to be able to use the normal
keyboard as well, but again, this is a minor gripe. I would have liked
shortcut keys to access the inventory and the Files, however; maybe
even a one-button shortcut for saving the game, since that involves
going through several screen fades every time.

One of the realistic books

Since I just mentioned the Files, I might as well explain
that. You're a professor in the British Museum. During your
explorations through the British Museum, you come across a few
important documents that will be automatically transferred to a list
of files instead of the inventory, which can be a bit confusing the
first time you encounter it. Most of the books, however (which
incidentally are the most realistic looking books I've seen in a
Myst-like adventure game), stay in place and you'll have to jot
down notes from them in order to solve the puzzles. To Private Moon
Studios' credit, I didn't get stuck at any puzzle (although they were
definitely not easy) and only had to backtrack once since I'd failed
to pick up an object—but it was logical where it would be. No
finding strange things in completely unexpected places here.

Conversations are played out from a third-person perspective,
movie-style. There is no way to influence the direction the
conversation takes, and be warned that a mouse click will skip the
entire conversation without a way to replay it. Sometimes these
conversations seem very info-dumpy, but I didn't feel they stretched
credibility too far.

Despite the programmers being from Hungary, all the texts and
voice-overs in the game are in very well-written English with optional
subtitles in several languages, including Hungarian, French and
German. I can only judge the quality of the German subtitles, and
those are well done. Speech is subtitled with a dialog window (that
also appears if you're playing the game in English) while letters and
books are translated via pop-up overlays: you hover the mouse over a
section of the text, and up pops a transparent window with the
translation of that section. Not everything is translated, which might
(or might not) give you clues as to what is important and what is
not. I like the idea of pop-up translations, since you can always read
the original text if you just move the mouse out of the way.

One thing I could not review were the promised board games; there
are none in the first episode. Episodes 2 through 13 will have a board
game at the end that you need to beat in order to finish the
episode. The developers promise that these will not be the board games
you've come to hate from games such as Drowned God (which had a
Nine Men's Morris with insanely strong AI) or The Seventh
Guest, but either very obscure games or more interesting versions
of known games. Then, after finishing the episode, you can play the
board game on-line against other registered players.

Speaking of registration, you pay $9.80 for an episode (the first
one weighs in at 207 megabytes; future episodes should be around the
same size) and get a download link with an unlocking code. Make sure
to turn off firewalls and web filters, or the unlocking code may not
work; plus, you can only use a code once, including failed attempts at
registrations, before you have to go and request a new one (but see
below). This you can do three times, whereafter you have to buy the
software again. I really hope that there will be a patch to play
offline at some point, since that system does not bode well for future
installations, especially if the registration server should go away
for some reason. $130 for a game might seem a little steep, but the
promise is that AGON in its entirety will be as large as three
or four "regular" boxed games (plus you don't have to pay all at once,
as the episodes will be released in two-month intervals). Having
finished the episode, it felt to be about the same length as a chapter
in Syberia or Amerzone, so the assessment is about
right, unless the following episodes are artificially elongated by the
board games.

Your registration also gives you access to the AGON Club, where
additional information on the various episodes is posted alongside
interviews, making-ofs, and printable CD covers in case you want to
archive the episodes; this is also where you play board games against
others. Oh, and if you buy the first thirteen episodes, the last one
is free.

I should also mention that the customer service for AGON is
excellent. I had problems trying to get the payment processor to
accept my credit card. (The processor was a Hungarian bank, so the
problem cannot be chalked up to AGON.) Then I had
problems registering the episode with the server (thanks to
aforementioned web filter). Throughout all this, László
Falvay of the support team helped me tirelessly, so I'd like to take
the opportunity for another "thank you" to him here.

All in all, I can safely say I'm already looking forward to the
next episode, and hope that Private Moon Studios sees AGON
through to the end.